This just in on the 11 PM Pacific Time news: A meteorite appears to break up at 30,000 feet over Russia, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. At least 100 injuries reported mostly due to broken glass from shock waves? Sonic booms? Video showing from several angles is showing up. Some objects appear to have hit ground. News outlets don't know the difference between a meteor, meteorite, and a meteor shower, but we knew that.

Some reports indicate that the incoming meteorite was intercepted by a quick-response (automatic?) surface to air missile. This needs verification.

In any way: It has happened. A meteorite airburst has hit a populated area. This will hopefully wake some people up. It seems it was extremely close to a regional disaster. If it had happened over Moscow, then imagine the chaos...

It seems like the meteor actually just bounces off the atmosphere and zips out in space again (you can see it briefly at the end of the trail as a white spot that moves away from the trail rapidly and disappears).

If so, then it wasn't an airburst explosion, but just a sonic boom and a drizzle of small fragments from a MUCH larger body. Seems that a lot of people just had a very, very lucky day. And I'm not talking about getting a famous video on YouTube, but to be alive at all...

InIt seems like the meteor actually just bounces off the atmosphere and zips out in space again (you can see it briefly at the end of the trail as a white spot that moves away from the trail rapidly and disappears).

Clear skies!
Thomas, Denmark

I am going to guess that what remained did not "zip" back into space but landed dozens of miles away. I believe its velocity was severely lowered during the burst and its altitude was then too low to escape Earth's gravity at that point.

There is nothing in the images posted so far on the Internet to suggest that the reported damage is from an "airburst" event. Actual structural damage, except to one zinc factory is not evident beyond broken windows. Rather, it looks like the damage was generated by a relatively low altitude, very strong, sonic boom. Likewise, the meteor does not terminate in a sudden flash but rather continues onward after a sharp peak in brightness (a point at which the double smoke trail suggests it broke into two major fagments?) for some distance before slowly fading out. Nor is there anything to imply the strike was a grazing event, since all the video so far shows an angle of descent in the track, not near earth paralleling flight.

Very unlikely, not with the kind of velocity it came in with. Nuclear missiles don't fly anywhere near that fast, let alone surface to air missiles. Even if one did take off because someone thought a nuclear attack was in progress, it couldn't have intercepted it. Moreover, knowing how many asteroids are loose piles of boulders, gravel and dust, I wouldn't be quick to dismiss any possibility that this event was related to the asteroid flyby. As we have seen back in 1994, a planet can pull a loosely held together object apart, turning it into a shotgun blast of impactors. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that a similar occurance here on Earth can take place. This was a very close call, this object or objecs nearly took out a city. That can spell really big trouble, if it was mistaken for a nuclear attack.

What strikes me from the video from the moving car is that it takes 10 seconds from the time it becomes visible until impact. The longest duration of a meteor (not space junk) that I have ever seen has been several seconds. Is the meteoroid decelerated that much by the earth's atmosphere, or was this one on a trajectory that nearly matched the earth's orbital velocity?

Tom, another explanation is that it got much lower (closer to observer) than most. Most meteors stay very high and, therefore, go through less atmosphere and are visible for shorter lengths of time.

Paul,

Yeah, that's probably all it is. Now I just thought about that classic video of the grazer over the Grand Tetons from the 70's, and it moved at an equally "slow" rate. It's probably moving at thousands of miles per hour, but far away.

Csrlice - There is currently the asteroid 2012DA14 about to approach very close to earth, however the approach direction is almost directly from the south celestial pole, with the "radiant" of any associated pieces blocked as seen from earth's northern hemisphere where the meteor itself was seen from. Thus, the Russian event is simply a coincidence.